Agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have gained access to a massive database of health and car insurance claims and are using it to track down people they want to deport, according to internal ICE material viewed by 404 Media. The database, which contains details on more than 1.8 billion insurance claims and 58 million medical bills and growing, includes peoples’ names, addresses, telephone and tax identification numbers, license plates, and other sensitive personal information.

The news shows how ICE continues to try to leverage whatever data it is able to access or purchase as part of its deportation mission. The news also highlights the existence of the database, called ISO ClaimSearch, that many members of the public have likely never heard of, nor understand they may be included in. Traditionally ISO ClaimSearch is used by insurers to identify people committing fraud or police to recover stolen vehicles. Now, that database is being repurposed as a deportation tool.

“ICE ERO use of this data reaffirms that ICE will stop at nothing to build a mass surveillance dragnet to track, surveil and criminalize all community members. Time and time again, ICE has shown us that it intends to build a mass surveillance system that nets all Americans. It is not about combatting crime, this is about the federal government having surveillance power and control over all Americans,” Julie Mao, co-founder and deputy director of Just Futures Law, told 404 Media in an email.

“Law enforcement, criminal justice, and regulatory agency personnel may obtain online access to ISO’s ClaimSearch, the insurance industry’s ‘All Claims Database’, which includes property and casualty claims data along with vehicle related information,” a document explaining the tool available online reads. 

The internal ICE material seen by 404 Media says that officers from the agency’s Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) section can use ISO ClaimSearch to help find targets. ERO is the section of ICE focused on deportations. The material says ISO ClaimSearch includes data on vehicle and health insurance claims.

The ISO in the tool’s name stands for Insurance Services Office, an insurance rating organization formed in the 1970s which is now a subsidiary of a company called Verisk. The database is nearly all encompassing, covering 98 percent of the insurance industry’s claims, according to an overview published by government authorities in Florida.

In essence, insurance companies feed claims into ISO ClaimSearch so when they do investigate fraud they can see more potentially related claims at once. “Insurance companies can become a member of ISO and they can send claims information to ISO to check whether similar claims have been filed with other insurance companies,” one description available online reads.

The document explaining the tool says that law enforcement agencies need to either be investigating insurance-related crime, or be developing background information on a list of people “who have been identified as persons of interest with regard to homeland security activity.” 

“‘Qualified’ law enforcement agencies will be able to see all information the ISO ClaimSearch database contains pertaining to vehicles, casualty claims, and property claims, including individual names, addresses,” the document says. It then says law enforcement agencies can also view driver license, Social Security, phone, and policy or claim numbers. The data also includes peoples’ tax identification numbers, their vehicle identification number (VIN), and license plate, the document says. Users are able to search the massive amount of data with some of those identifiers.

Law enforcement users have to be approved by the National Insurance Crime Bureau (NICB), according to ISO ClaimSearch’s website. The NICB is a not-for-profit organization whose members include more than 1,200 property-casualty insurance companies, according to its website.

404 Media obtained a copy of a report generated with ISO ClaimSearch from a private industry source. It is not clear if it presents the same sort of results that an ICE agent would see when using the tool, but the report included a detailed history of insurance claims related to specific vehicles, names, phone numbers, license plates, and redacted driver license, Social Security, and tax numbers and email addresses. 

“ClaimSearch is a property/casualty claims database that helps clients identify patterns that may indicate insurance fraud. ClaimSearch is used to aid in insurance fraud investigations, so insurers can determine if claims can be fast-tracked or if they require a closer look for potential fraud. ClaimSearch does not track immigration or citizenship status, and neither DHS nor ICE are clients of Verisk for ClaimSearch,” a spokesperson for Verisk, the company that owns the database, told 404 Media in a statement. When pressed on whether ICE may have obtained access to the data through another provider, the spokesperson reiterated that law enforcement access is administered through the NICB.

A spokesperson for the NICB told 404 Media “The National Insurance Crime Bureau is a national, century-old, not-for-profit organization supported by approximately 1,200 property and casualty insurance companies. We sit at the intersection of the insurance industry and state, local, and federal law enforcement to help detect, prevent, and deter insurance crimes. While NICB provides value to our member companies, we also serve a significant public benefit by helping to stem the estimated billions of dollars in economic harm that insurance crime causes to individual policyholders across the country every year. NICB employees work closely with law enforcement entities, government agencies, and prosecutors throughout the country to fulfill its mission.” The spokesperson did not deny that ICE has access to the tool.

A video published to Verisk’s YouTube channel explains some of ISO ClaimSearch’s various uses. One is to feed claims through the Medicare system to ensure that each reported loss is paid for by the right party (a second video says Verisk facilitates claim settlements between insurance carriers and injured parties); another is to allow law enforcement to recover stolen construction or farming vehicles and return them to their owners; a third is to help states recover unpaid child support on behalf of families.

Broadly the tool is “used for fraud prevention and detection,” Igor Ostrovskiy, a private investigator with Ostro Intelligence, told 404 Media. “ISO is a very important tool within the insurance world,” one insurance company said in an industry podcast uploaded to YouTube last year.

That data is now being leveraged to find ICE’s targets, according to the internal agency material.

“This is another, shocking example of mass data collection ostensibly collected for one purpose misconstrued and misappropriated for a far more nefarious purpose—to conduct mass surveillance and criminalize community members,” Mao added.

ICE has repeatedly turned to novel, overlooked, or non-government databases, sometimes despite legal issues. The agency previously bought access to smartphone location data harvested from ordinary apps. A 2023 government watchdog report found that ICE and other agencies used that data illegally. The report recommended ICE stop using such data until it obtained the necessary approvals, which ICE refused to do.

ICE Is Using a New Facial Recognition App to Identify People, Leaked Emails Show

The new tool, called Mobile Fortify, uses the CBP system which ordinarily takes photos of people when they enter or exit the U.S., according to internal ICE emails viewed by 404 Media. Now ICE is using it in the field.

404 MediaJoseph Cox

In 2021 researchers at Georgetown Law found ICE accessed a private utility database with hundreds of millions of records, containing data from more than 80 utility companies, including water, electricity, and gas. Thomson Reuters, which runs the database called CLEAR, said it was reviewing its work selling personal data that ICE had used to investigate immigrants, The Washington Post reported in 2022. That, too, is usually marketed as a tool for investigating fraud.

Last month 404 Media revealed ICE was using a new facial recognition app to identify people in the field. That tool, called Mobile Fortify, uses the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) system which ordinarily takes photos of people as they enter or exit the U.S.

404 Media was also first to reveal that Palantir had entered a contract with ICE for “complete target analysis of known populations.” Leaked Palantir material then described Palantir as a “more mature partner to ICE.”

Included in last week’s budget bill is around $150 billion for immigration enforcement and border security. That includes $6 billion for border technology and surveillance. 

Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, and Kristi Noem, the head of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), recently gave ICE a quota of 3,000 arrests a day. After the increase in funding last week, border czar Tom Homan floated that the agency needs to arrest 7,000 a day.

Neither ICE or DHS more broadly responded to requests for comment.

You’ve heard of vibe coding, with, I’m sure, not a little horror. Spin the gacha and make a website! And then you have unfortunate experiences.

There are people who get quietly called in to fix the vibe code disaster areas. They tend not to talk about it in public.

But the other thing that cheaparse clients think they can replace with a chatbot is copywriting.

And it turns out chatbot copy reads like slop, and it sucks, and it’s boring, and your eyes fall off it.

So copywriters, who can actually write are getting called in to fix chatbot vibe-writing. And a few of them have gone public. [BBC]

Sarah Skidd, in Arizona, was called in to fix some terrible chatbot website writing. She charged $100 an hour:

It was the kind of copy that you typically see in AI copy – just very basic; it wasn’t interesting. It was supposed to sell and intrigue but instead it was very vanilla.

Skidd now has a side business fixing these.

Sophie Warner at Create Designs in the UK is seeing the same thing. Clients cheap out with a chatbot and get bad text on a bad and insecure vibe-coded website code.

Warner says: “We are spending more time educating clients on the consequences.”

Where there’s muck, there’s brass. And sometimes the muck is toxic waste. And radioactive. So if you get called in to fix a vibe-slopchurned disaster, charge as much as you can. Then charge more than that.

• Video version

Data preservationists and archivists have been working tirelessly since the election of President Donald Trump to save websites, data, and public information that’s being removed by the administration for promoting or even mentioning diversity. The administration is now targeting National Parks signs that educate visitors about anything other than “beauty” and “grandeur,” and demanding they remove signs that mention “negative” aspects of American history. 

In March, Trump issued an executive order, titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity To American History,” demanding public officials ensure that public monuments and markers under the Department of the Interior’s jurisdiction never address anything negative about American history, past or present. Instead, Trump wrote, they should only ever acknowledge how pretty the landscape looks.

Last month, National Park Service directors across the country were informed that they must post surveys at informational sites that encourage visitors to report "any signs or other information that are negative about either past or living Americans or that fail to emphasize the beauty, grandeur, and abundance of landscapes and other natural features," as dictated in a May follow-up order from Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. QR codes started popping up on placards in national parks that take visitors to a survey that asks them to snitch on "any signs or other information that are negative about either past or living Americans or that fail to emphasize the beauty, grandeur, and abundance of landscapes and other natural features." 

The orders demand that this “negative” content must be removed by September 17.

Following these orders, volunteer preservationists from Safeguarding Research & Culture and the Data Rescue Project launched Save Our Signs, a project that asks parks visitors to upload photos of placards, signage and monuments on public lands—including at national parks, historic sites, monuments, memorials, battlefields, trails, and lakeshores—to help preserve them if they’re removed from public view.

Trump and Burgum’s orders don’t give specific examples of content they’d deem negative. But the Colorado Sun reported that signs with the survey QR code appeared at the Amache National Historic Site in June; Amache was one of ten incarceration sites for Japanese Americans during World War II. NPR reported that a sign also appeared at the Civil War battlefield at Wilson's Creek in Missouri. Numerous sites across the country serve to educate visitors about histories that reflect fights for civil rights, recognize atrocities carried out by the U.S. government on Black and Indigenous people, or acknowledge contributions made by minority groups.   

Lynda Kellam, a founding member of the Data Rescue Project and a data librarian at a university, told 404 Media that the group started discussing the project in mid-June, and partnered with another group at the University of Minnesota that was already working on a similar project. Jenny McBurney, the Government Publications Librarian at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, told 404 Media that conversations among her university network arose from the wider effort to preserve information being modified and removed on government websites. 

In April, NIH websites, including repositories, including archives of cancer imagery, Alzheimer’s disease research, sleep studies, HIV databases, and COVID-19 vaccination and mortality data, were marked for removal and archivists scrambled to save them. In February, NASA website administrators were told to scrub their sites of anything that could be considered “DEI,” including mentions of indigenous people, environmental justice, and women in leadership. And in January, Github activity showed federal workers deleting and editing documents, employee handbooks, Slack bots, and job listings in an attempt to comply with Trump’s policies against diversity, equity, and inclusion.

“To me, this order to remove sign content that ‘disparages’ Americans is an extension of this loss of information that people rely on,” McBurney said. “The current administration is trying to scrub websites, datasets, and now signs in National Parks (and on other public lands) of words or ideas that they don't like. We're trying to preserve this content to help preserve our full history, not just a tidy whitewashed version.”

Save Our Signs launched the current iteration on July 3 and plan to make the collected photos public in October.

“In addition to being a data librarian, I am a trained historian specializing in American history. My research primarily revolves around anti-imperial and anti-lynching movements in the U.S.,” Kellam said. “Through this work, I've observed that the contributions of marginalized groups are frequently overlooked, yet they are pivotal to the nation's development. We need to have a comprehensive understanding of our history, acknowledging both its positive and problematic aspects. The removal of these signs would result in an incomplete and biased portrayal of our past.” 

The Save Our Signs group plans to make the collected photos public in October. “It is essential that we make this content public and preserve all of this public interpretative material for the future,” McBurney said. “It was all funded with taxpayer money and it belongs to all of us. We’re worried that a lot of stuff could end up in the trash can and we want to make sure that we save a copy. Some of these signs might be outdated or wrong. But we don’t think the intent was to improve the accuracy of NPS interpretation. There has been SO much work over the last 30 years to widen the lens and nuance the interpretations that are shared in the national parks. This effort threatens all that by introducing a process to cull signs and messaging in a way that is not transparent.”

Trump has focused on gutting the Park Service since day one of his presidency: Since his administration took office, the National Park Service has lost almost a quarter of its permanent staff, according to the National Parks Conservation Association. On Thursday, Trump issued a new executive order that will raise entry fees to national parks for foreign tourists. 

The “Restoring Truth and Sanity To American History” order states that Burgum must “ensure that all public monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties within the Department of the Interior’s jurisdiction do not contain descriptions, depictions, or other content that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times), and instead focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people or, with respect to natural features, the beauty, abundance, and grandeur of the American landscape.” Kyle Patterson, public affairs officer at Rocky Mountain National Park, told the Denver Post that these signs have been posted “in a variety of public-facing locations including visitor centers, toilet facilities, trailheads and other visitor contact points that are easily accessible and don’t impede the flow of traffic.”

Predictably, parks visitors are using the QR code survey to make their opinions heard. “This felonious Administration is the very definition of un-American. The parks belong to us, the people. ... Respectfully, GO **** YOURSELVES” one comment directed to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said, in a leaked document provided to SFGATE by the National Parks Conservation Association.

“To maintain a democratic society, it is essential for the electorate to be well-informed, which includes having a thorough awareness of our historical challenges,” Kellam said. “This project combines our expertise as data librarians and preservationists and our concern for telling the full story of our country.”

“The point of history is not just to tell happy stories that make some people feel good. It's to help us understand how and why we got to this point,” McBurney said. “And National Parks sites have been chosen very carefully to help tell that broad and complicated history of our nation. If we just start removing things with no thought and consideration, we risk undermining all of that. We risk losing all kinds of work that has been done over so many years to help people understand the places they are visiting.”

Bitte schön.

Also this one is kinda playable on the phone:
00:01 [1] _ 00:03 [3] __ 00:05 [5] __ 00:06 [6]
00:02 [2] ________________________ 00:07 [7]
_________________ 00:04 [4] ________________
Hold [8] for silence ( 00:08 )

(Direktlink)

Michael Kalus posted a photo:

Michael Kalus posted a photo: